Islamic State Sex Slave Reveals Horrific Plight In Captivity And Begs West To Bomb Brothel

DAHUK, IRAQ: A Yazidi woman sits inside a room covered with bread at the Lalesh temple situated in a valley near Dahuk, 430 Kilometers (260 miles) northwest of Baghdad, during the community's congregation ritual, 10 October 2006. On the fourth day of ceremonies of the Eid al-Jamaa, Yazidis continued to visit the temple of Lalesh, the holiest site for Yazidis and one of the oldest continuously visited religious sites in Iraq. Yazidis, who are believed to number about 1.2 million in the world th

A young Yazidi woman being held by Islamic State militants has reportedly begged the West to bomb the brothel where she says she is being repeatedly raped.

In a harrowing interview with BBC World Service, Compassion4Kurdistan activists raising awareness of IS' persecution of women revealed that Kurdish fighters took a phone call from the unidentified woman.

The peshmerga told the British-based activists that the woman was sobbing as she described her plight and debilitating injuries on the phone.

A United Nations official yesterday said evidence strongly indicates that the IS group's assault on Iraq's Yazidi's is "an attempt to commit genocide."

Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ivan Simonovic spoke to reporters Tuesday after a weeklong visit to Iraq, where he spoke with at least 30 Yazidis from various parts of the country.

After hundreds of Yazidis were killed as the Islamic State group swept across parts of northern and western Iraq in August, an estimated 7,000 Yazidis stayed and have been forced to convert to the Islamic State group's harsh interpretation of Islam.

Islamic State fighters have captured, enslaved and sold Yazidi women and children, and claim the act is justified in Islam to prevent men from feeling "tempted" by other, non-enslaved women.

According to a piece in the group's full-colour magazine, which is published in English and evidently aimed at a Western audience, confirms the long-rumoured atrocities committed by the group in Iraq, where Yazidi women have reported being kidnapped, sold for a few dollars and repeatedly raped.

The latest issue of Dabiq magazine released on Sunday stated, "the enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers." It added, "the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Sharia amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations."

The Islamic State's magazine

Anyone opposing slavery in such circumstances is not a Muslim, the piece says. "Enslaving the families of the kuffār [non-believers] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Sharia that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Qur'an... and thereby apostatizing from Islam."

A Human Rights Watch report, which came out on Sunday, claimed hundreds of Yazidi men, women and children from Iraq are being held captive in makeshift detention facilities by the group.

Iraqi Yazidi girls at a festival near Dohuk - the minority sect have been targeted by IS

The report follows two UN officials issuing a joint statement on the "barbaric acts" of sexual violence committed by ISIS fighters.

"We condemn, in the strongest terms, the explicit targeting of women and children and the barbaric acts the 'Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant' has perpetrated on minorities in areas under its control, and we remind all armed groups that acts of sexual violence are grave human rights violations that can be considered as war crimes and crimes against humanity," Nickolay Mladenov, special representative of the UN secretary-general for Iraq and Zainab Hawa Bangura, special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict, said.

The statement, reported by Newsweek, cited evidence of "savage rapes" being used as weapons of war against women and teenage boys and girls belonging to the Yazidi, Christian, Turkomen and Shabak minority groups in Iraq.

Academic and Middle East expert Haleh Esfandiari has said IS allow their followers to rape captured girls and women as a "reward".

"ISIS has received considerable world attention for its savage beheadings, executions of captured soldiers and men in conquered towns and villages, violence against Christians and Shiites, and the destruction of non-Sunni shrines and places of worship," she blogged for the Wall Street Journal.

"But its barbarity against women has been treated as a side issue. Arab and Muslim governments, vocal on the threat ISIS poses to regional stability, have been virtually silent on ISIS’s systemic degradation, abuse, and humiliation of women.

"To the men of ISIS, women are an inferior race, to be enjoyed for sex and be discarded, or to be sold off as slaves."

Amnesty International spokeswoman Donatella Rovera, who is in Iraq, told Huffington Post UK that, though the charity had not verified any cases of women suffering sexual abuse at the hands of IS, she said there was evidence that captured women were under "strong pressure to convert to Islam and strong pressure to marry (ISIS) fighters".

"They took girls to Syria to sell them," she said, her body shyly hunched over as she spoke. "I was sold in Syria. I stayed about five days with my two sisters, then one of my sisters was sold and taken (back) to Mosul, and I remained in Syria."

In Raqqa, she said, she was first married off to a Palestinian man. She claims she shot him, saying the Palestinian's Iraqi housekeeper who was in a dispute with the man helped her by giving her a gun. She fled, but she had nowhere to run. So she went to the only place she knew, she said — the house where she was first held with the other girls in Raqqa.

There, the militants did not recognise her and sold her off again — for $1,000 to a Saudi fighter, she said. The Saudi militant took her to a house where he lived with other fighters. "He told me, 'I'm going to change your name to Abeer, so your mother doesn't recognize you,'" she said. "You'll become Muslim, then I will marry you. But I refused to become a Muslim and that's why I fled."